Telephony call-center software

ZestPhone

Who we are

We are Zestfinance (zestfinance.com) a financial services company that helps lenders with underwriting and loan servicing. In addition to building cutting-edge underwriting algorithms, we’ve also built a host of home-grown CRM tools and loan servicing products for our lending partners. We recently added call-center style phone controls into our existing CRM by leveraging Twilio’s cloud-based communication technology, which we call ZestPhone.

What is ZestPhone?

ZestPhone is a drop-in phone widget that can be simply added to any web application to give you full call center functionality.

Features:

  • Inbound and outbound calling
  • Call outbound to anywhere in the world*
  • Set up your existing business phone number with Twilio or purchase one from Twilio to get started
  • Have multiple business phone numbers in use for marketing attribution
  • Cold and warm transfer
  • Allow your agents transfer calls to each other either directly or with introduction
  • Put a call on hold / resume a call
  • Agent status
  • Ability to respond to telephony events in your application
  • Uses existing agent names/numbers/ids
  • Embeds into your existing javascript-enabled application
  • PSTN or VoIP (i.e. use a regular phone, SIP, or twilio client)
  • Call recording
  • All calls are recorded while the customer is on the line with an agent and are stored by Twilio (storage rates apply)
  • Voicemail
  • Customers can be transferred to a specific agent’s voicemail if the agent is busy with another customer or offline

Why use ZestPhone / Am I (or my company) a good candidate?

  • Quick integration You want to quickly and easily add phone capabilities to your application
  • 1:1 Customer Service Experience You want to empower your call center agents to provide 1:1 support to customers with easy-to-use transfer and voicemail capabilities
  • Use any type of phone You have call centers with different phone setups and want software to support them all (PSTN, SIP, VoIP)
  • Low cost per minute You want to take advantage of twilio’s competitive usage pricing

Running ZestPhone server

ZestPhone is a ruby on rails application, backed by a MySql database. It's only known to work for sure using ruby 1.9.3, but any 1.9.x ruby version is probably fine.

  • You need a Twilio account of course.
  • A Pusher account
  • A database that is supported by rails, and that supports locking (only MySql is known to work)
  • Your application needs to include backbone.js

The complete setup guide is here: https://github.com/ZestFinance/zestphone/blob/master/SETUP.md

Javascript events your app can respond to

All events have this basic data:

  {
    event_id:
    conversation_id:
    conversation_state:
    call_id: # This will be empty for events that happen at the conversation level
    number: # The customer's number
    owner: # Is the agent receiving this event the conversation owner?
  }
  • telephony:Answer: Fired when the agent answers his phone
  • telephony:Busy: Fired to an agent whose phone was busy
  • telephony:CallFail: Sent to an agent when the agent leg fails
  • telephony:CompleteHold: Sent to all agents when the customer has been put on hold
  • telephony:CompleteOneStepTransfer: Sent to the agent who just answered a one-step transfer
  • telephony:CompleteResume: Sent to all agents when the customer is taken off of hold

  • telephony:CompleteTwoStepTransfer: Sent to all agents after the 2nd agent picks up in a two-step transfer. The data sent to agent1 will include agent2's name, extension, and csr_type. The data sent to agent2 will include that data for agent1.

  • telephony:Conference Sent to an agent who was just moved into a conference room. This can happen during hold or transfer actions, and is not very interesting on it's own.

  • telephony:Connect

  • telephony:csrDidChangeStatus

  • telephony:csrNotAvailable

  • telephony:CustomerLeftTwoStepTransfer

  • telephony:FailOneStepTransfer

  • telephony:FailTwoStepTransfer

  • telephony:InitiateOneStepTransfer

  • telephony:InitiateTwoStepTransfer

  • telephony:InitializeWidget

  • telephony:LeaveTwoStepTransfer

  • telephony:LeaveVoicemail

  • telephony:NoAnswer

  • telephony:QueueChange

  • telephony:RemoveFromConference

  • telephony:Start

  • telephony:Terminate

  • telephony:toggleCsrStatus

  • telephony:WidgetReady

  • telephony:conversationCreated

  • transferInitiated

Javascript events you can trigger from your app

  • telephony:ClickToCall: Sample usage: javascript $(this).trigger("telephony:ClickToCall", to: $(event.currentTarget).text());